It occurs to me that in the past couple of months I've been doing more criticky stuff in the off-blog world than here, which perhaps accounts for this paradoxical feeling that I'm getting nowhere, while running as fast as I can. I'm not sure what I think about this: of course I have that old-fashioned pleasure at being in print, but it's also one of those odd reversals. While most people think of blogs as the lightweight aside to the main game, I've always thought of my work here as the real deal. Is this a presage of the post-internet, where the glittering pixels get folded back into ink and paper? Who knows?

Anyway, on to business. My Australian review of the MTC's production of Boston Marriage is online today. Readers might also be interested in my earlier review of Hoy Polloy's 2007 production of the same play. At least you can't say that I'm not consistent, even across very different productions. (No, there's no conscious plagiarising of myself there).

Meanwhile, on the plays-as-literature issue, George Hunka is also opining in print in the current issue of the Yale School of Drama's Theatre journal. It is clearly a trending topic in the zeitgeist. He posts an extract at Superfluities Redux.

It seems unfair that, after a week of writerly virtue - dogsbody stuff, filling in forms and painstakingly dotting tees and crossing eyes - the weather should reward me with the prospect of days and days of unremitting, exhausting heat. What happened to Melbourne's gentle autumns? Did I dream those gloriously mild, high-heavened days when the sunshine spilt golden over the green lawn and coppery leaves gently detached themselves from the branches and tinkled down onto the carefully raked gravel footpaths? I did dream them? Damn.

It must have been like that other dream, in which David Mamet was once a woolly-minded liberal. Now, according to the playwright himself, the scales have fallen from his eyes and he has seen the light. He is a tough-talking free-marketeer. He believes in Milton Friedman. He believes in the market. He believes in America. He believes that people are not nice. The only surprising aspect of this is that Mamet ever thought he thought otherwise. I mean, he wrote Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, right?

Still, this doesn't prevent Michael Billington from lamenting the demise of a great playwright, which is apparently directly linked to his embrace of right wing politics. "The precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists," says Billington, "are not exactly encouraging". I don't know why people from an alarmingly various spectrum of politics keep equating Art with Lefty Liberalism, when the briefest trawl of Western cultural history shows this is by no means a direct fit. There is any number of exceptions to the altruistic, progressive artist working for the Good of Humankind.

It seems to me that Mamet might have been more interesting as a playwright when he was less aware of what he thought, and that it is this self-recognition, rather than any essential shift in perception, that might be the problem with his recent work. There's a reason why poets are supposed to be blind. In any case, a work of art that strikes beyond the superficial simply isn't biddable to such simplistic divisions, however much commentators - flapping in from the right or the left - attempt to rip off its limbs in order to stuff it into whichever ideological box takes their fancy. But that's another discussion.

Meanwhile, back at my desk, last night I saw Moving Target at the Malthouse, the keenly anticipated new play by Marius von Mayenburg. It's a fascinating evening that left me feeling intriguingly ambivalent. It's a complex work, at once deeply exciting and deeply flawed, and I need to see it again - and, in particular, to think a bit more about the performance language that it creates - before I can write about it. So don't expect that review tomorrow or even the next day; it's a show that invites some serious interrogation. In the meantime, take my word for it that Moving Target is a must-see for anyone who's interested in theatre.

Boston Marriage by David Mamet, directed by Wayne Pearn. Designed by Paul King, lighting by Stelios Karagiannis, sound design by Chris Milne. With Corinne Davies, Helen Hopkins and Eleanor Wilson. Hoy Polloy @ the Mechanics Institute Performing Arts Centre, Brunswick, until October 6. Bookings: 9016 3873.

David Mamet allegedly wrote Boston Marriage to prove that he was capable of creating good roles for women. There are a number of lessons to draw from this; primarily, that a playwright with something to prove ought to be locked in a cupboard until he gets over it. Still, I suppose, in an anthropological kind of way, it's an interesting exercise to see this most macho of writers dressing up in drag.


Boston Marriage, written in 1999, is a bizarre stylistic collision between David Mamet, Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet. Despite a decent production by Hoy Polloy, it's every bit as awful as it sounds, at once arch and crude. I guess it's a kind of reworked American Buffalo, translated into Wildese and flipped over into the feminine.

It's basically a farce, revolving around a complicated intrigue between two upper-class women in Victorian-era Boston, Anna (Helen Hopkins) and Claire (Corinne Davies). They have a "Boston Marriage", which is to say, a long-term lesbian relationship that - as long as it was pursued with discretion - was a means for women to obtain "sensual pleasure" without threatening their respectability. Their dialogues are regularly interrupted by their maid, Catherine (Eleanor Wilson), newly arrived from the Orkneys, who provides the occasion for some low comedy and a crass critique on class.

As the play opens, Anna reveals that she has a rich male "protector", who provides her with money and expensive gifts; meanwhile, Claire has fallen in love with a schoolgirl. The protector is no threat to their relationship - men, after all, "only exist to be deceived" - but the schoolgirl is. When it turns out that Claire's young love-object is actually the daughter of Anna's protector, their source of income is threatened. There follows a bungling plot cooked up between the two women to cover a crime - the alleged theft of a necklace - that never happens.

Aside from the play, there's little to complain of in the production. Wayne Pearn directs with a deft hand, using a detailed design and clever lighting that subtly highlight the play's artifice. Hopkins and Davies negotiate Mamet's jaw-cracking dialogue with aplomb; if there is little sense of "sensual pleasure" between them, I think it is not their fault. All those words get in the way. Mamet doing Wilde demonstrates that style is not something that can merely be put on, like a hat. He dresses his dialogue up with a strained literary verbosity: as Mozart says of Salieri in Amadeus, there are "too many notes".

Wilson, as the not-too-bright maid, has the opposite problem. She really exists to be a spur to her employer's upper-class heartlessness (Anna can't tell the difference between the Irish and the Scots, and constantly berates her for the potato famine) and to deliver a couple of faux-naif double entendres.

It made for quite a long 90 minutes. As we left, my son commented that the play might have been funnier if it had been played by men in drag. He may be correct: after all, Genet's The Maids, which this play inevitably recalls, is written to be played by men. Genet had a better handle on the game of gender than Mamet does. But even in the best of circumstances, it's hard to imagine this play being anything more than a slight curiosity.

Whatever it is, it's teeth-achingly mannered. I'm all for artifice in the theatre, and Mamet has always been a master of artifice: but this is like drinking tea with too much sugar in it. Here art becomes the lie that reveals - nothing. I think it's called decadence.

Picture: Publicity shot for Boston Marriage: from left, Corinne Davies, Helen Hopkins and Eleanor Wilson.